Episode 221: How MITER Brands Built the C700: Inside the Fiberglass Window Launch

Welcome to the Clear Impact Podcast brought to you by MITRE Brands University.

Thanks for joining us today.

My name is Sherry Conner and I am your host.

All right, so good afternoon.

We are here on the Clear Impact Podcast and we're recording in Tacoma.

These two gentlemen were both on the docket for recording with me and they decided to

come in together, which is really fun.

Love the interaction.

So I'm going to let you guys introduce yourselves and then you can talk about what your role

is and then we'll circle back to the C700.

So we'll start here.

Yeah, my name is Victor Stance here.

I'm the brand new director of product engineering here at MailGuard just starting that

role up right now before that senior engineer on the new product design team.

Awesome.

And how long have you been with the company?

I've been with the company from 2018.

I left for a year and then I came back because I missed it so much.

Well, that's a nice way to say that.

So eight, seven years, ish.

Yeah.

Okay, and you?

My name is Mike Barton.

I am the director of operations for Tacoma Manufacturing.

I've been with the company 18 years now.

Wow.

Yeah.

That's amazing.

It's been a good ride.

Always in operations.

No, actually I started out in the engineering group.

And so I have a little bit of a unique perspective and probably why we decided to partner up on

this code.

We want to really build that relationship between engineering and ops.

Well, yeah, because engineering comes up with a great idea is that operations has to pull

it off.

Absolutely.

So it is good for you guys to be aligned.

Yeah.

It is.

Right.

Because otherwise you're like, it's extremely important for us to be aligned.

Yeah.

Because otherwise you're like, what?

Who designed this?

How are we supposed to do that?

Well, that's actually how I got into operations.

The previous engineering manager at the company said, if you ever want to see how poorly

your designs perform, go to operations and see, like you design it, it's in this computer

model, everything looks really, really good.

It works great on paper, but when you go and translates to the floor, it may not work

as good as you think.

So that's actually what led me in the path to get into operations is to help translate

engineering work into production.

Oh, okay.

Yeah.

That's a great perspective.

I love that.

So let's talk about the C700.

Yeah.

The C700 is our brand new redesigned fiberglass project.

So it's replacing the C650.

It's brand new design from the ground up, straight from the whiteboard all the way through.

So we started off with the spec document really trying to understand what the customer wants

and needs are where we're maybe lacking on our old product, where we could improve on

our new product.

To my point, just understanding the manufacturer ability of fiberglass, I can also speak on

fiberglass as a very difficult thing to manufacture and use from corner joinery to fitment to

tolerancing everything about it is much more difficult than vinyl or you can just weld

and there's a lot more flexibility there.

All right.

And so have you had your hand on this since the beginning?

Yeah.

So I started off on it a little bit, then I got moved on some other projects, but I've

been brought back on, so I've been kind of helping out at the final hour, really getting

things across the finish line, helping with testing, helping with the final deliverables

and working with production to help us start building it.

Okay.

And so Mike, tell me about the C700.

Sure.

So I've actually got to see this from a couple of different perspectives.

When we first started conceiving of this product, I was over internal supply and to Victor's

point, fiberglass is a little bit different animal in terms of how the sticks are produced.

So we spent a lot of time working with the engineers to basically design for pull-trutability,

make it so that we can get better yield out of the gate, make it easier to tune and produce.

Even on the painting side, we spent a lot of time figuring out how to terminate the paint,

how it's going to be hung, how it's going to be run through the machine.

So I got a unique perspective up front as they were developing and designing the shapes

and profiles.

And then somewhere in the middle of it, I transitioned over to the manufacturing side, right as we're

starting to set the first piece of equipment on the floor and really get involved and own

it from kind of the back-end side of it as well.

Okay.

And so forgive me, I don't know very much about fiberglass.

I did have a chance to or the pull-trusion plant this summer, but I don't recall.

Is the paint applied to the raw sticks or is it applied after the product is assembled?

It's coated in the raw sticks phase.

Okay.

So essentially we'll build up a supermarket of inventory in the raw and then we'll paint

to order.

Oh, okay.

Yeah.

And so we have two painting processes.

One is a powder coat process.

A coat which is typically an electrostatic process used for coating metals.

We've adopted it to coat fiberglass using thermal stacks, so we use heat to actually draw the

powders to the profile and coat.

And then we have a wet coat process which allows us to do dual color on the same profile.

Oh, okay.

Yeah.

So that's where you can get the color that you want on the outside but have a white on

the inside.

Correct.

Yes.

Right.

And so what challenges were there on the C700?

Yeah, for sure.

So to my point, you know, when you talk about powder coat and you talk about dual coat,

which is wet coat, from a design perspective, that makes it challenging because as design

engineers we have to look at tolerances constantly.

So every single piece that snaps together, there's a tolerance to that.

When you're making a piece of profile, nothing comes out exactly to the 0.001 of a decimal

every single time.

No.

No, it doesn't.

So you have to start to account for your tolerancing, but then when you take things

into account, well, there's a whole different paint process and the buildup of that.

So we learned a lot of things working with protrusion.

And in some cases, we actually decided to have different profiles made specifically for

like a wet coat process versus a powder coat process just to help us through those tolerancing

issues.

The other thing is maybe Mike can speak more to it, but I don't work over there on the

protrusion side and there's a lot of rovings and mats that go in, but as you're designing

features, you got to work really closely with the team and say, hey, I want this unique

feature in this profile.

Is that something that's doable?

Am I going to get the strength that I need?

So it's a lot of back and forth and understanding, okay, this is how it's actually going to be

made where the rovings and the mats go in so that you know whether or not you have the

strength for that feature or you can build that feature.

Okay.

I need you to make some definitions for me.

What are rovings and mats, but I don't know what that is.

So I can speak to that since I spent some time in protrusion.

So the rovings are essentially unidirectional, fiberglass strands, so think of it as a piece

of yarn that's made out of really fine fibers of glass.

The mat is essentially those same rovings that are chopped up and lightly glued together

to form kind of a veil, if you will, and that veil is cut to width and essentially wraps

the entire exterior perimeter of the profile and also the interior hollows.

So to Victor's point, like as we design these shapes that are maybe one inch by one and

a half inch tall, there's a lot of material that has to feed into the die to make it work

and some of those geometry's get really complex.

So there's a lot of back and forth with the engineering team and the protrusion team

to make sure that what the engineers wanted was feasible and if it wasn't, what could

we do to compromise to get something that worked the same?

So it's not like a vinyl or an aluminum where you run it through some sort of CNC machine.

It's built that way.

Yeah.

So even with vinyl.

So vinyl is an extrusion process where it goes through a die and you get a stick with

a continuous 2D profile all the way down.

Fiverglass is the same, but the manufacturing process is quite different.

You're drawing these rovings in the mat through a die and you're actually dredging the

rovings through a vat of resin as it goes into the die then it cures to create that same

2D profile, the continuous length of the part.

Okay.

But then there's still like if you have cutouts for hardware and things like that that's

done through a die process?

No, that's done through a CNC process.

A CNC, okay.

So that's a little bit unique to how we manufacture, so switching gears from how we make the stick

to how we make the frame, a lot of new equipment, in fact we've asked our equipment vendors

to do a lot of things that hadn't been done before and talking to Joseph, the manufacturers

or fabrication equipment, to this point the largest or the most axes they put into a fabrication

machine is 22.

Our most complex machine has 32 axes of motion to create the fabs and the profiles.

Wow.

So it's doing a lot and on top of that fiberglass is very abrasive.

So when you cut it and you don't clean it up, it gets into the gears and the motors

and the bearings and wears out the equipment quite rapidly.

So we asked them to do a lot around desk collection, desk mitigation and control to keep

the machines cleaner, which will run longer, less wear and tear and all that good stuff.

So even just on the fab side a lot of stuff that hadn't been done before.

Wow.

Yeah.

That's really revolutionary though.

It is.

Okay.

I'm understanding it a little better now.

Thank you.

Okay.

Kind of going back to your question to what's some of the challenges we've faced with C700,

the fiberglass.

We talked about the profiles themselves, but another key one that I wanted to mention

was corner joinery.

So when you think of a traditional vinyl window, that's welded together.

Right.

So you've got some heat on it, you weld it and essentially sealed.

So you don't really have to worry too much about water management.

Although you still got to get water out of channels and stuff like that, but the internal

hollows are sealed off.

With fiberglass, you can't weld it.

You can't put heat on it and just stick it together.

So it's called a mechanically joined corner.

So we've done a lot of work designing very custom corner keys with injection ports and

all sorts of flow paths for our hot melt.

So what we do is we'll, and we've got a piece of equipment that we'll talk about in a

little bit, but essentially it was designed so that you put a corner key in.

You put the four pieces together and then you screw the corner keys into place and then

you've got an injection port where you can put hot melt and it will go along these flow

paths within our keys and really just seal the corner.

So then we don't have the water issue.

So that's a really new and it was a challenging and fun experiment.

I mean, we were 3D printing translucent profiles just so that we could watch the flow path

of the hot melt go through so that we can confirm that, yeah, it's doing what we wanted

to do.

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Oh, spoken like such an engineer.

I love it.

That's cool though.

That's a really smart way to see it and to test it.

Now the question becomes how do you make that repeatable?

How do you give that to manufacturing and say, hey, here's this cool thing we did.

Do it every day.

All day.

Right.

So we actually reached out again to working with equipment vendors and we have our own

custom piece of equipment.

It's from Erdman if I'm not mistaken.

And it's a corner joinery machine.

So if you drive fit the pieces together, put it on the pieces of on a conveyor belt, it

goes into the machine, it puts the screws into your corner keys, it injects the hot melt

and then it goes a little bit further down and then you put your back bedding on and then

it tilts it up ready to go down the line.

So does all of that automatically affect?

I think that's one of the great features of this product, fiberglass is a very heavy product

and with fiberglass comes strength, strength comes bigger sizes.

And looking at how we assemble the old C650 product, it's a lot of manual movement, takes

a lot of people to move heavy stuff.

There's a lot of thoughtful automation so you were not really handling the window until

it comes out as an assembled unit and then it goes on a cart.

So a lot of thought put into not just how to design and make the corner joinery better

and the profile is better but how to produce it better even.

Wow.

Yeah.

It's awesome.

Yeah, it's really cool.

And so let's talk about the testing a little bit.

So you talked about printing in clear translucent so that you could see where the hot melt was

coming through.

What other kinds of testing did you have to go through on this?

Yeah, so there's actually a lot of testing involved with engineering if you believe

me or not.

Yeah, no, I'm sure there is.

We start off with a lot of component testing.

So corner keys, we 3D print objects, we'll do corner keys and test those out with hot

melt injection.

But we also have a whole materials lab that is set up here at the 10-10 building.

Okay.

Really cool materials lab, probably every single piece of equipment you can think of

is there.

So really it starts with that level of testing.

As we're working through fiberglass profiles, as we're working through designs, a 3D print

something maybe to figure something out, the other thing is you get fiberglass samples

that come back from protrusion and then we do tensile strength testing, we do compression

testing, we do all sorts of testing on it just to understand what it is that we're getting

and what we're designing around, because ultimately it leads us into what we call certification

testing.

Certification testing is really your air water structural, what a few others, but that

is the goal we got to get through all of our certification testing and we have to test

every single configuration that we build.

So it's a very huge test plan, I mean we're talking 6080 window configurations that need

to be tested at max sizes and then if there's any downsize testing for stronger rating,

but we do all the component level testing so that we are in a place where we feel very

confident when we go into cert testing and we've been able to see that by doing a lot of

this initial component testing when it comes time to do the cert testing, we're getting

the structural numbers that we're shooting for, there's still some R&D that goes on during

any sort of testing, but it's a lot less than before where you really don't know the material

that you're working with, you don't know exactly how things like I said, even the hot

melt flowing into the corner, if you didn't understand that and then you go to a water test

and you've got leaking corners, you might say, well I don't know what's going on, you're

trying to fix it and really by starting in the beginning and doing that component testing,

then we were able to mitigate a lot of that back in.

Okay, I like that.

So you have never before used equipment in the manufacturing, we had to adjust the recipe

for lack of a better word for the fiberglass and then train people on how to load the

machines properly and then how to offload and package, which is probably very similar

to what you've been doing.

Actually, a little bit different.

Is it?

Yeah, quite a bit different actually.

Okay.

So from the start, I think there's been a really good relationship between engineering

and manufacturing, which is what allows us to make this all possible.

From the time we set the first piece of equipment on the ground, we had team members come over

from C650 to learn the new process to work with the engineers to understand the intent

of the design and of the process and then work with them to troubleshoot where there

were gaps in that intent and as more team members came over to work on it to learn a different

way of building, right?

What used to take five people might now take three people.

What we used to do in five minutes now takes two minutes and just all the way down through

all the different steps, learning, training, developing, cross-training, building a diverse

workforce, even down the packaging where we now have a cut to size cardboard.

We have automated plastic wrapping and banding as it comes out the end.

So just completely different from tip to tail, but integrating production with the engineering

team as we developed and set stuff on the floor and commissioned it really helps us get

us a leg up on when we go to launch.

That's amazing.

I love that.

So we have a product launch protocol for PGT, but it's like a small batch production.

It's, you know, hey, we're going to toy with this window and we're going to build them

by hand and get the bugs out and do test runs with our dealer audience and get the feedback

from the field.

But that's not like an entire product launch with brand new equipment and brand new recipes

on the frame types.

That's amazing.

I am understanding now why I'm here and talking about this.

This is, wow.

And we've actually seen that process from afar and actually adopted the ILAB concept

up here in Tacoma.

And I love the concept of ILAB, especially when you have a design that we might not have

a market for to test it out and try new things with this.

We have a known market, we have a known product and something that's very long in the tooth

in the C650 product that we need to replace.

It makes sense to kind of move towards a more mass production right out of the gate process.

We know, again, we know there's demand.

We just have to figure it out and build it.

No, it totally makes sense just from a sales perspective, but it's just very different

than what I've been exposed to.

Well, I'll take even a step further, specifically for this project.

I mean, we're not limiting to just a whole new product line.

I mean, this is a whole new facility, essentially.

We emptied the whole warehouse.

We cleaned it up, brand new floors, painted everything, fixed everything up.

I might can talk about it more, but I mean, we really went all out with this project.

It's not just, oh, it's every window, which is already an achievement, but it's like

from the manufacturing, from the start, before we put any piece of equipment in, I mean,

we made sure that the building was ready to receive this project.

Nice.

We're designing the product of the future for fiberglass.

We want to have the manufacturing facility of the future to support it and the equipment

of the future to support it as well.

So it's kind of an all-encompassing package when you look at it.

Wow.

That's awesome.

All right, so we get to put a bow on it tonight, right?

Absolutely.

We have a party with our key customers and Steve Moore and I just had a conversation

about that and really focusing on the customers that are going to embrace it and promote it

and really do right by the product and not just whoever wants it, which I think is so

smart.

So is there anything else that we need to chat about with the C700?

I think the last piece that I wanted to bring in, you know, we talked about the tab

centers with Joseph, the Erdman, and then packaging, but we kind of missed a piece

in between.

We talked about it just a little bit, but once it goes through a corner joinery, we

don't pick it up again at all until it's on a card and out the door.

And that's really done by a really cool, innovative line, which is our starts line.

And as your sashes are coming through, they're moved from station to station right in

front of the operator.

It's really a true manufacturing line where the product shows up.

You do your job.

It keeps going.

And then it gets to a point where the sash just marries up with the frame.

There's a lot of thought and process that goes into that.

So it's really coming out together.

They marry up and then they're out and it just keeps repeating like that.

That was really neat.

I thought we should mention it.

Yeah.

So the balancers aren't added by hand?

They are.

There's still some hand work that's done, but we don't have to physically pick up or manipulate

the windows to do it.

That's really nice.

So what's the approximate workforce over there?

Are you estimating?

Are going to be needed?

So I won't talk in specific numbers, but this was designed to take 30% of the labor

out of the process to build compared to the C650 product.

The question that I was going to ask is, well, are we worried about losing team members

who are having to lay people off?

And in my answers, no, like this window is designed to double or triple the volume of

C650.

Right.

So we can always use more people to build more windows.

Right.

So we'll be more efficient by 30% but with the volume, there's going to be plenty of jobs

to go around.

Yeah.

Well, that's what I was going to say.

You can save those roles for things that only people can do.

And if you're looking for that repeatability and that consistency, sometimes it is better

to have a machine do it.

Absolutely.

And these products are heavy.

Very heavy.

We have some doors that weigh north of 800 pounds.

Yeah.

And when you ask just a couple of people to get around and lift it, it's a lot of work.

So with this new process, we eliminate a lot of that heavy lifting.

Which makes everybody happy.

Absolutely.

And safer.

A hundred percent.

I know we have some sliding glass door panels in our Fort Myers facility that Chris

Kerwin and I talked about where we can do a five by 12 panel with laminated insulated

glass.

That maybe weighs like 800 pounds.

And so shout out to all the installers out there who are having to actually lift these

things and load them and unload them and put them into somebody's house.

But if you're manufacturing that product and you're on that line 10 or 12 hours a day,

that's a whole different kind of work.

And to be able to automate some of that and have lift assists in place and have automation

so that you're not killing your workforce.

You don't want to do that.

No.

Definitely not.

Well, this is amazing.

Good.

Thank you for helping educate us and educate me and the listeners.

And hopefully everybody will oon on and appreciate the product, but then to understand what

goes into it and what's behind it, I think is really helpful.

Very good.

Well gentlemen, I'll see you tonight.

Yeah, thank you for having us on.

Yeah.

Thank you very much for having us.

Yeah.

And this was a great way to have the conversation.

I don't know who his idea that was, but it was a good idea.

You didn't blame that on Dean.

It was Dean's idea.

Yeah.

I like Dean.

He's my fan.

Nice.

I'll see you tonight.

Thanks.

Perfect.

All right.

All right.

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